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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2008 
Loggers Destroying Monarch's Mexico Home
 Associated Press
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Mexico City - Satellite photographs show illegal loggers have clear-cut large swathes of trees in the heart of a monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico, threatening the insects' habitat, a researcher said Monday.
The images show illegal loggers chopped 1,100 acres of trees since 2004 in the core of a wooded park in Michoacan state where clouds of orange- and black-winged butterflies nest each winter, said Lincoln Brower, a professor emeritus of biology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who has studied the monarchs for 52 years.
"The butterfly area can't survive if this kind of logging continues," said Brower, who also directs the preservation group that paid for the satellite images. He noted that the delicate creatures need leafy foliage to protect them from rain and cold.
A Mexican presidential decree issued in November, 2000, forbids logging in the central zone of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a 124,000-acre area that spans Michoacan and Mexico states. However, regulation has been spotty.
Mexico's environmental protection agency, Profepa, didn't return several phone messages seeking comment Monday.
The disappearing habitat threatens a delicate migratory route that has spanned two continents and a million square miles for some 10,000 years, Brower said.
Each September, the butterflies begin a 3,400-mile journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the U.S. to the central Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered a scientific wonder. |
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